CERN social media

Overview

Social media is one of the tools that the organization uses to disseminate information and is a component of the CERN communication strategy. CERN is currently active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Linkedin.

CERN began using the social media channel Twitter in 2008 and by August 2019 had more than 2.5 million followers keen to find out news about the organization. During the 4 July 2012 Higgs announcement CERN’s live tweets reached journalists faster than the press release and helped contribute to worldwide coverage of the particle discovery and an October 2013 study cited CERN as the most effective international organization on Twitter. A research paper was published in 2016 detailing how CERN's social media drives public engagement with particle physics.

Strategy

The main purpose of CERN’s social media strategy is NOT to gain website visitors but to increase the awareness of the laboratory on social-media platforms. There are three main strands to the social-media strategy:

Begin a journey
Key messages are disseminated by repackaging CERN’s online content for the different social-media channels. Most social-media content contains links back to the CERN website, starting a journey to find out more. All our social-media’s contents are created with a high level of science exigency. Even if messages are sometimes short on social media, they are linked to a webpage to go further.Key Performance Indicators (KPI):

Click-through: traffic from social media to website

Time spent on website

Foster engagement
CERN’s presence on social-media channels fosters engagement in the general public and helps to form an online community of stakeholders interested in the laboratory and its work. The level of engagement on social media, through the shares and comments of CERN information is regularly monitored.Key Performance Indicators (KPI):

Likes

Comments

Shares

Engagement rate: interactions/impressions × 100

Retain positive sentiment
Social media is a way to reach the general public and a way to monitor sentiment towards the Organization. By keeping sentiment positive and handling negative sentiment constructively by responding as appropriate to questions or concerns, CERN’s strong brand identity is retained.Key Performance Indicators (KPI):

Guidelines

CERN welcomes your comments and will moderate comments using these guidelines:
Please keep comments relevant. Irrelevant, inappropriate or offensive comments may be deleted.
Stay on topic. Other readers expect the comments about a post to deal with the topic at hand.

Channels

CERN and the LHC experiments are currently active on the following channels:

The CERN communications group is responsible for the CERN channels in the list above and works closely with the Human Resources Talent Acquisition group and outreach contacts within the LHC experiments for the additional listed channels.

Want to go social?

If you would like to create an official social media account dedicated to your experiment, project or event, here is what you should consider beforehand.

What experiment / project / event do you work for?

What social media platform do you want to use?

What audience are you trying to reach?

Is there an existing channel already reaching that audience that you could feed into?

What communications do you plan to send out?

How regularly do you plan to communicate?

What human resources do you have allocated to maintaining this?

Are you a project or event? If so, what is foreseen for the social media accounts when the project / event ends?